Ezekiel 31:8

The site chosen for the Garden was probably the most beautiful spot of its kind in all the world, and the climate was then ideal. Nowhere else was there a location which could have lent itself so perfectly to becoming such a paradise of botanic expression. In this rendezvous the cream of the civilization of Urantia was forgathering. Without and beyond, the world lay in darkness, ignorance, and savagery. Eden was the one bright spot on Urantia; it was naturally a dream of loveliness, and it soon became a poem of exquisite and perfected landscape glory.

At the time of Adam’s arrival, though the Garden was only one-fourth finished, it had thousands of miles of irrigation ditches and more than twelve thousand miles of paved paths and roads. There were a trifle over five thousand brick buildings in the various sectors, and the trees and plants were almost beyond number. Seven was the largest number of houses composing any one cluster in the park. And though the structures of the Garden were simple, they were most artistic. The roads and paths were well built, and the landscaping was exquisite.

If you enjoy the flowers, shrubs, and trees of Urantia, then will you feast your eyes upon the botanical beauty and the floral grandeur of the supernal gardens of Edentia. But it is beyond my powers of description to undertake to convey to the mortal mind an adequate concept of these beauties of the heavenly worlds. Truly, eye has not seen such glories as await your arrival on these worlds of the mortal-ascension adventure.

When the plans of the Material Son went astray, Adam and his family were not permitted to carry the core of the tree away from the Garden. When the Nodites invaded Eden, they were told that they would become as “gods if they partook of the fruit of the tree.” Much to their surprise they found it unguarded. They ate freely of the fruit for years, but it did nothing for them; they were all material mortals of the realm; they lacked that endowment which acted as a complement to the fruit of the tree. They became enraged at their inability to benefit from the tree of life, and in connection with one of their internal wars, the temple and the tree were both destroyed by fire; only the stone wall stood until the Garden was subsequently submerged. This was the second temple of the Father to perish.

Although the work of embellishment was hardly finished at the time of Adam’s arrival, the place was already a gem of botanic beauty; and during the early days of his sojourn in Eden the whole Garden took on new form and assumed new proportions of beauty and grandeur. Never before this time nor after has Urantia harbored such a beautiful and replete exhibition of horticulture and agriculture.

During the days of the Prince’s rule the tree was growing from the earth in the central and circular courtyard of the Father’s temple. Upon the outbreak of the rebellion it was regrown from the central core by Van and his associates in their temporary camp. This Edentia shrub was subsequently taken to their highland retreat, where it served both Van and Amadon for more than one hundred and fifty thousand years.

When Van and his associates made ready the Garden for Adam and Eve, they transplanted the Edentia tree to the Garden of Eden, where, once again, it grew in a central, circular courtyard of another temple to the Father. And Adam and Eve periodically partook of its fruit for the maintenance of their dual form of physical life.

The mountains surrounding the Garden abounded in precious stones and metals, though these received very little attention. The dominant idea was to be the glorification of horticulture and the exaltation of agriculture.

This Mediterranean peninsula had a salubrious climate and an equable temperature; this stabilized weather was due to the encircling mountains and to the fact that this area was virtually an island in an inland sea. While it rained copiously on the surrounding highlands, it seldom rained in Eden proper. But each night, from the extensive network of artificial irrigation channels, a “mist would go up” to refresh the vegetation of the Garden.

The coast line of this land mass was considerably elevated, and the neck connecting with the mainland was only twenty-seven miles wide at the narrowest point. The great river that watered the Garden came down from the higher lands of the peninsula and flowed east through the peninsular neck to the mainland and thence across the lowlands of Mesopotamia to the sea beyond. It was fed by four tributaries which took origin in the coastal hills of the Edenic peninsula, and these are the “four heads” of the river which “went out of Eden,” and which later became confused with the branches of the rivers surrounding the second garden.